368738 - Please spellcheck all single-line inputboxes named "Search" or "Subject"

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Jason Spiro]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

By default, Firefox 2 spell checks text typed into HTML TEXTAREAs, but not into single-line input boxes.  Please also spell-check all input boxes with a name, id, or title attribute containing the word "Search" or "Subject".

IMO this will work on most websites.  I did a quick survey of Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail, and all use well-labeled inputboxes.  So all would be spellchecked.

(Thanks to Lachlan Hunt for his comment at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339127#c7.  It inspired this suggestion.)

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jason Spiro]

Cc'ing Lachlan and subscribers of bug 341723.

Comment 2

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

See also Bug 341715.

Comment 3

[Jason Spiro]

The current bug seems possibly stalled, so I just filed a new, simpler bug.  It is bug 376686: Please spellcheck all single-line inputboxes named "Subject".  It is the same as the current bug, but it refers to Subject boxes only, not Search boxes.

Comment 5

[Jason Spiro]

As Gavin pointed out, I didn't need to file the simpler bug 376686.

But, to point out the obvious:  If you are considering writing a patch, and you're worried that spellchecking Search boxes will cause a problem, then just spellcheck Subject fields in your patch.  But I, personally, think spellchecking both would be useful.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This is a firefox UI issue, not spellcheck back end.

Comment 7

[Bruno 'Aqualon' Escherl]

You can simply set layout.spellcheckDefault to 2 to check all input fields and since bug 341723 is closed as WONTFIX, what's the sense of this bug?

Comment 8

[Jason Spiro]

(In reply to comment #7)

> You can simply set layout.spellcheckDefault to 2 to check all input fields

Most users don't know how to use the about.config screen.

> and since bug 341723 is closed as WONTFIX, what's the sense of this bug?

Bruno, this will help out users.  Setting the default value of layout.spellcheckDefault to 2 is not a sensible idea because it creates too many distracting red squiggles.  But IMO my idea is more sensible.  See also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339127#c7

I think my idea is great.  :)  Is there anyone here who believes it is a *bad* idea?  If so, why do you think that?

Comment 9

[Jo Hermans]

It's a bad idea because it would work on some sites, and not on others, depending on the field name. And it wouldn't work on sites that use another language to name that field (titre, titel, onderwerp, suject, ...). And most importantly, it would ONLY work for search & subject field, not for any others.

A much better solution that already exists, is the 'spellcheck' attribute for the input-field. Google already uses this to enable spellchecking for their subject-field (and disable it for the to-field), ignoring any possible value of layout.spellcheckDefault :

<input name="subject" id=":gd" class="rSfjbb" spellcheck="true" tabindex="1">

This should be closed as WORKSFORME or WONTFIX.